Clyde's Last Photograph

It was the last picture taken of my Grandfather. I am the little boy in the picture, roughly eighteen months old.

Clyde Strait was born September 23. 1883.  He has no middle name, as did either of his brothers, Leon and Ross.  My Dad, the first child, was born when Clyde was 37.  Clyde's courtship of my Dad's mother, Flossie Snow, went on quite sometime, and was partly responsible for the late age to start a family.

I was not the first grandchild, as both my Dad's sister, Alice, and my Dad's brother, Douglas, had had children first. It is me, through whatever twist of fate and time, that is in his last picture.

He was a farmer, and operated a large farm in Southeast Michigan, in an area known as Stony Point.  The fields had to be cleared of rocks and stones multiple times in order to be usable.  He also had a lot of dairy cows.

He was often sickly, and my Dad had to take over the farming as he grew older, particularly in the forties.  There were complications with my Grandfather's gall bladder, mostly due to the way it was being treated.  The cure and medicines were often making him sicker than the gall bladder itself.

Clyde never attended church much.  He was suspicious of pastors, and though most of them were hypocrites, and mostly concerned with money.  My father in later life was a faithful churchgoer, but it took him a good long while to reach that point.

Clyde was both stingy and generous.  He had a farmer's sense of conservation, but was known to give money to children when he visited town, including the African American children he saw.  The progressive leaning that have threaded through our family was also with Clyde.  I remember my Dad talking about how Clyde and the family liked Teddy Roosevelt and the Bullmoose party, and were very taken with Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

I don't have a lot of personal memories of my Grandfather.  He died not long after that picture was taken.  He was run over by a tractor.  The tractor he was driving.  The tractor was having mechanical problems.  He got out in front of it to fix it, and the tractor took off somehow and ran him over.

I wish I had gotten to know him better.  From the letters and materials my father has, he seems like an interesting man with a good sense of humor (you think I'm the first Strait with that - ha!  Sometimes people inherit more than just eye color!).

I am grateful that my Dad lived long enough to know Benjamin, my youngest son, and to leave him solid memories and wonderful impressions that Benjamin will carry the rest of his life.

As Simon and Garfunkel sing in Bookends

I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They're all that's left you